The Beginnings of Poetry
9781465634726
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
It is the object of the following pages neither to defend poetry nor to account for it, but simply to study it as a social institution. Questions of its importance, of the place which it has held, or ought to have held, in the esteem of men, and of the part which it is yet to play, are interesting but not vital to one who is bent upon the investigation of it as an element in human life. A defence is doubtless needed now and then by way of answer to the pessimist like Peacock, or to the moralist, the founder of states ideal or real, like Plato and Mahomet. Scattered about the Koran are hints that verse-making folk, like the shepherd’s turncock, are booked for an unpleasant future, although it is well known that the prophet in earlier days had been very fond of poetry; while Plato himself, if one may believe his editors, began as a poet, but took to prose because the older art was declining; with the change he turned puritan as well, and saw no room for poets in his ideal state. Attacks of this sort, however, are as old as poetry itself, which, like “the service, sir,” has been going to the dogs time out of mind, and very early formed the habit of looking back to better days. For mediæval relations these remembered arguments of Plato, backed by a band of Christian writers, had put the art to its shifts; but Aristotle’s fragment served the renaissance as adequate answer, and it is interesting to note that the champion of poetry in Aristotle long outlived the philosopher. Petrarch, taking the laurel, was moved to defend poetry against her foes, and yet found, as critics find now, that she had come by some of her worst wounds at the hands of her votaries; for who, in any age, as Goethe asked and answered in his Divan, “Who is driving poetry off the face of the earth?—The poets.” Certainly not the philosophers and men of science, though that is the common belief. Lefebvre, in 1697, thought that he had given poetry its mortal blow when he attacked it in the name of morals and of science; and his onslaught is worth the notice if only to show how little Renan and others urge to-day which has not been urged at any time since Petrarch. Selden, Newton, Bentham, have been among the scoffers; so, too, Pascal. As to Newton, “A friend once said to him, ‘Sir Isaac, what is your opinion of poetry?’ His answer was, ‘I’ll tell you that of Barrow; he said that poetry was a kind of ingenious nonsense.’” All this is no more than disrespectful allusion to the equator, jocose moments of the learned; yet it is quoted very seriously by those who think to preach a funeral sermon over the poetic art. So that when Renan expects to see poetry swallowed up by science, and when it is said that Goethe, born a century later, would throw poetry to the winds and give full play to his scientific genius, that Voltaire would live altogether for mathematics, and that Shakspere himself, “the great psychologist,” would “leave the drama of humanity for the drama of the world,” abjure wings, and settle to the collar with psychical research folk and societies for child-study,—even then the friends of poetry need feel no great alarm; all this, allowing for conditions of the time, was said long ago, and has been repeated in the dialect of each generation. As for the past of poetry, kings have been its nursing fathers and queens its nursing mothers; and for its future, one may well be content with the words of the late M. Guyau, a man of scientific training and instincts, who has looked carefully and temperately at the whole question and concludes that “poetry will continue to be the natural language of all great and lasting emotion.” Vindication apart, there is the art of poetry, the technique, the Horatian view; and with this treatment of the subject the present work has as little to do as with defence and praise.
